NONFICTION - May 21, 1995

THE TRAVELER’S TREE by Bruno Bontempelli, translated by Linda Coverdale (The New Press: $20; 250 pp.). “Ravenala on the monkey’s shoulder”--that’s the message in a bottle, literally, that has brought Malestro, a naval chronicler and adventurer, aboard the sailing ship Entremetteuse on its ill-fated expedition to the Caribbean. The 700-ton ship is becalmed within sight of a lush island, and while Malestro thinks of gold--he hopes the message refers to hidden treasure--his shipmates crave only fruit and fresh water . . . but all wishes are denied by the isle’s seemingly impassible reef. In “The Traveler’s Tree” Bruno Bontempelli, who lives in Paris, has dispensed with inessentials: it is a taut and claustrophobic novel, full of rats and disease and animal waste, and written by an author obviously steeped in French existential literature, in man’s Sisyphean labors before nature’s impenetrable ways. The Chevalier du Mouchet has mounted the expedition to satisfy his obsession with islands, and is (along with Malestro) the sailor most determined to reach the tantalizing shore, but even his hopes sink as scurvy kills increasing numbers of seamen, the water beneath the inert Entremetteuse becomes a cesspool, as rations rot and water goes rank. Bontempelli relates these growing horrors with clinical detachment, and the result is a mesmerizing sea-tale of uncommon power. The ship’s fate, given the novel’s allegorical form, is foreordained but nonetheless exciting, for Bontempelli’s evocation of 18th-Century seamanship is masterly.